Monique Schwitter

Eins im Andern

«When you start googling your first boyfriend or girlfriend one day, that’s a response to the sounds of tapping you hear as you go to sleep, and, more loudly, when you look in the mirror first thing in the morning, at the sight of the deep vertical crease between your eyebrows. All attempts to find the source of the noise – is it inside, outside, from the attic, under your skull – are futile.»

Twelve Loves in the order of the twelve apostles make «Eins im Andern». Monique Schwitter’s roundelay narration presents love from various angles and in various shades. Petrus was the first on whom she built her love, he was followed by his brother Andrew, then came Jacob, and so on until not Judas ended the roundelay but a nameless you: the brother who «betrayed» love through his early death. One inside the other the author finally finds the secret core of her love.
One does not chose love, it says, love befalls one. She wrests several portraits from the unnerving every day, charmingly and easily portraying the affairs of the heart without forgetting to include death. She never forces her personas to spill the beans, rather she lets them deviate or stay silent. They emerge in her head and are formed through her narration. Memories and writing go hand in hand, and the author constantly reflects on them. They mutually dissolve each other and ultimately form, one out of the other, this astonishing apostolic roundelay of love.
Monique Schwitter presses every button in her storytelling. She cunningly varies her characters and motives, repeats and interweaves them, loses them and picks them up again. She deviates, leaves associative traces and, despite the irony, she makes no pretence of the underlying gravity. She thereby artfully crafts genuine constellations of moving urgency about love and everything else.

(Beat Mazenauer, transl. by Anja Hälg)

Also recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch
http://www.prohelvetia.ch/12-recommended-books.3952.0.html

«Eins im Andern» was awarded the Swiss Book Prize 2015.

Droschl Verlag, Wien /Graz 2015

ISBN: 978-3-85420-969-0